Online Global Course in ICT Journalism : Newsroom as wiki group two report

This is a report about Group Two activity.

Basic Information of the Group:

- The group was created by Media Group to facilitate discussions about WIKI task.

- The Group link is (http://groups.google.com/group/ppbtwo/topics (

- The period of Group activity is 8 -24 May 2007.

- The Group members are 15.

- The Group messages are 95.

- The participants in the Group Two WIKI are Five (until Thursday evening). Our WIKI URL is ( http://mediaictrain.pbwiki.com/Group_two)


Difficult Start

In the beginning, the Group faced a lot of difficulties which contributed to the delay of fulfilling its task.



Those difficulties can be summarized as followed:

- Some members got lost in many necessary steps were needed to do their task like accepting the Group invitations sent by the Media Group.



- We suffered misunderstanding between the function of the Group page and the function of the WIKI page, until we discovered that the Group page was created to facilitate private discussions between its members, and not for writing in group.



- Some of the member did not coordinate well with others and they hurried up to determine the subject of the report, eventually those steps did not work well in creating teamwork.


Turning Point

By the time, the members succeeded in doing their tasks well; they accepted the invitations of the Group; they took part actively in the private discussions within the Group page, and they were able to find their way easily to the WIKI page and work in it.

After we failed to create a teamwork regarding the proposed subject titled "The Future of Newspapers", we managed to reorganize the Group work again by appointing a leader , an editor and a recorder.

Through more active discussions in the Group, we agreed to choose the subject titled "The Freedom of Press", in which every member has written about the freedom of the press in his country- all the members from Africa.


Gradually, the members posted their work in the WIKI, and our editor worked hard to polish the final report.

Great Lessons

We have learned great experience from this task, as followed:
- It is easy to work alone, difficult to work in group, but working in group eventually leads to mutual benefits for all members.
- We thought it was impossible to start discussions with people we do not know, and to reach real results at the end, but now we are aware that coordinating within a group can be an easy task.
- To start a teamwork, you need to slow down and wait to let all the passengers catch the train. No need for a train without passengers. It was a mistake to hurry up and let the others behind.
- It is better to take a lot of time for discussions, but in the right time you need to be decisive to push everything forward.

Recroder of Group Two

Houssam Abdrabo